If you've put serious hours into Dishonored, you know Harvey Smith thinks in systems and consequences. The co-creator of the new studio Black Pony Immersive sat down with Kotaku to talk about defying expectations in what the interview itself calls the most underserved genre, and he had plenty to say about what most games get wrong.

The framing that jumped out at me comes straight from the interview's own headline: Smith calls the studio's whole approach "an act of rebellion to try to do something hopeful in times like this." Strong words from a designer whose career was built on plague-ridden cities, moral decay, and player-driven carnage. Kotaku's piece positions the studio as a deliberate defiance of expectations, his own resume and the industry's, and that thread runs through the whole conversation. Rebellion and hope, paired together. The hopeful part is my read of his framing, but it's sitting right there in the headline.

Immersive sims are, for my money, the most underserved genre in gaming, and Kotaku's framing agrees with him on that count. Looking Glass built the blueprint with System Shock and Thief, and Smith's own credits sit at the heart of the lineage that followed. I want to say Ultima Underworld was doing half of this before most current developers were born, and nobody gave it a parade either. The genre has been declared dead more times than I've declared my backlog manageable. Every few years someone says it's back, a game sells modestly, and the obituaries get dusted off again.

Smith's take, per the interview, is that most games are missing the stuff that made him fall in love with the form in the first place: simulated worlds that respond to you instead of rollercoasters that merely permit you. That philosophy runs through his whole career, branching problem-solving on one end, systemic consequence on the other. Have you ever replayed the same mission three times just to see if the game noticed you crawling through a vent instead of shooting a guard? That's the whole appeal. The game is paying attention.

Black Pony Immersive is still early, and the interview doesn't hand over a full reveal of what they're building. But the studio reads like a mission statement now rather than a vague announcement. He's not interested in remaking his greatest hits with a new coat of paint, and he's not chasing trends. The hopeful undercurrent is the interesting wrinkle. Dark worlds with humanist cores have always been his signature, Dunwall was miserable but it loved its people, and if the new project leans even harder into that, it fits everything he's ever made.

There's a version of this story where a veteran designer goes off and makes a smaller, weirder thing and it lands beautifully. I'll cop to my bias up front: I think the immersive sims of the 2010s he was involved with are two of the best-designed games of their decade, and I've been salty for years about how little lasting cultural footprint they got relative to their quality. That's my opinion, not a sales chart. But it's exactly why this interview lands. If anyone has earned the right to bet on the genre nobody else will touch, it's a designer who's been building these worlds for decades.

Smith isn't making games because it's easy. He's making them because the alternative, another decade of risk-averse blockbusters, sounds worse.

Rebellion looks good on him. Now he just has to ship the thing.